


Fate in Motion, Seasons in Breaths

by Snake (Fatality145)



Category: Dishonored (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, M/M, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-16
Updated: 2013-07-16
Packaged: 2017-12-20 09:51:35
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,538
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/885851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fatality145/pseuds/Snake
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i></i>
  <br/>
  <span class="small">The pale flesh beneath his fingers wasn’t supposed to be real, but it felt like it, and that made it more unnerving than he should probably have experienced. His nail ran between the spaces of three dark freckles that stood stark against the white of the other’s shoulder blade. He knew what they tasted like, or rather their lack of – like ozone on the tongue, acrid. But, like the ripped skin on the inside of his cheek that he couldn’t stop himself from biting into, it was a painful pleasure.</span>
  <br/>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fate in Motion, Seasons in Breaths

**Author's Note:**

> i haven't written in so long this might suck haha bye
> 
> this is all so overly metaphorical i don't knowwwww don't look at me

“Winter.” The voice was velvet, though more slated, smooth ice than a comforting softness. It sunk right into his worn skin like so many needles, dragged along the space under his ear and left gooseflesh in its wake.

 

                The pale flesh beneath his fingers wasn’t supposed to be real, but it felt like it, and that made it more unnerving than he should probably have experienced. His nail ran between the spaces of three dark freckles that stood stark against the white of the other’s shoulder blade. He knew what they tasted like, or rather their lack of – like ozone on the tongue, acrid. But, like the ripped skin on the inside of his cheek that he couldn’t stop himself from biting into, it was a painful pleasure.

 

                Winter was late, and it didn’t come with the blood on his hands which cooled much too quickly, drying into the cracks of his leather gloves, the knuckles of them stretched from clenched fists, tendons sticking out there and on the insides of his wrists.

 

                The chill came with the cold sweat that dotted the nape of his neck, his forehead, his temples, when he awoke in the same bed to the same ceiling to the same burnt images in the back of his eyes, in the core of his head. There wasn’t a gasp that scraped down his throat, but a sigh that would drift out, and he did not upstart, but instead sunk down, muscle tension ebbing away one by one.

 

                Winter was in the _dead eyes_ he saw as the Lord Protector was dragged away, in the frozen expression of an Empress, set in glass, or set beneath heatless, hard concrete and dirt that only the worms could, or would, bore through. Winter was in the soft cries he’d wake up to from an orphan lamb kept in a place her hands never should have had to have touched.

 

                It never really ended with the months, and he could still feel the sickness the season brought rotting in his bones and his lungs and deeper.

 

                “…I don’t like winter.” Daud muttered, stopping himself from biting the inside of his mouth just as he stopped himself from leaning over to taste the brine and sparking energy that laid beneath the alabaster skin himself. Both lead to wrought, he knew.

 

                “No… I suppose you wouldn’t.” The Outsider’s arms crossed over his wide, bare chest, amusement in his features as he laid his chin down on his forearms, those, too, speckled in places with imperfections. Though, they weren’t quite that, not to Daud, anyway, unexpected however in a spirit otherwise immaculate. He’d never gotten around to asking why he showed as he did, as a man, as a human at all. He supposed it didn’t matter, and he knew he wasn’t the one asking questions, here.

 

                “Spring.” Turning his head to the side, the Outsider pressed his cheek to his arms as his fingertips traced over the long healed mark of a burn, and Daud could almost feel the flare coming right back as the digits slotted into their perfect places. The spirit’s knuckles bore shaded tendrils, extra appendages that were as much of him as the bottom of the sea, barren of light, the darkness which showed through in the colour of his eyes – those of the drowned, the souls which spilt down his throat. Those shadows dug further than he could see, and if he focused, he would feel the Void filtering through him, lighting the brand in the back of his hand dull azures and ambers, the only brightness in the black of night.

 

                Exhaling slowly, Daud tipped his head back against the headboard of the old bed, dark ringed eyes looking to the ceiling.

 

                Spring is better, but worse, also. It was sudden for him. It was warm, for once, and it might’ve been nice if not for the sticky cruor he couldn’t glean from his blade. It stayed hot, straight from the artery. This was blood he didn’t care about, just as all the rest were, and what he thought they all would be.

 

                Like the sea, spring gave and took away, like sea-spray biting at and corroding a mass of stone, and then washing up shells onto the shore. In Gristol, there was rarely a middle ground. Or, perhaps, there was, and the warmth through the perpetual clouds just seemed strange and overbearing.

 

                He’d recognized the levelling between the cold and the heat only once, what spring should be, and sometimes he missed it, other times he didn’t. The eyes which stuck to his back from the alley didn’t send his blood icy, nor did it blister it, and the brief smile on his lips was neither as well, more a habit than anything else.

 

                Spring shouldn’t sprint and waste itself out and it shouldn’t dawdle and drag its feet. The city he’d fed with corpses spoke so willingly back to him he didn’t have to do either, keeping a fast but manageable pace, a test.

 

                Daud had to admit, she was more winter than spring, but in the warmth, it was comfortable, a contrasting breeze. She would become his own, a darker skinned thorn in a bramble, a specific breed. Maybe his creed was merely weeds, but growth was growth, after all.

 

                He remembered, though, that that spring had chilling winds as it came to its end, one that belayed the past, stagnant snow and foreswore the frenetic hale that he didn’t yet know would come.

 

                Closing his eyes, he didn’t need to speak, knowing very well the Outsider could see just what he would be saying in more clarity than he could think it or articulate it himself.

 

                “Autumn—“

 

                “These are not in order?” Daud asked, tipping his head back down to look at him, eyes opened and narrowed.

 

                “No.” The Outsider answered, looking back at him. Neither the Assassin nor the spirit spoke until the latter relented with a cock of his brow, “They all bleed into one, don’t they?” It was less a question and more a statement.

 

                Daud knew he wouldn’t get much more than that of an explanation, and, ultimately, he was right. He always was. They intermingled, none of them submissive to the other, yet all of them dominant, all the time; petals solid in ice that steamed but refused to melt under a sun that wasn’t so bright anymore.

 

                Autumn is in wading chest high waters with the dead for company, disease ridden sewerage sinking into his boots and staining his clothes, no trees, no houses, no skies holding colour as everything made to die a slow death. He’d known autumn was coming. While, to others, it may be morbid, saddening, he usually felt most at home in these times. At least, he would have, if everything hadn’t gone black and white, rather than mottled, fading reds and browns amidst fleeting green.

 

                Like shed leaves, he’d been dropped, rank liquid dripping from him onto a broken outcropping, the weak wood not creaking but moaning as he stood up onto it, the supporting beams progressively getting chewed away by the water it was submerged in.

 

                Compared to the rest of Gristol, his home hadn’t really changed all that much with the season, but it still held the degrade, just as he did himself, resting his weight upon an empty shrine, moths having eaten at the purple, golden embroidered cloths he had strung up himself.

 

                What he’d seen he didn’t want anybody else to see, and what he’d heard he didn’t want anybody else to hear. As pathetic as it was, he knew that. Standing among the wreckage he called his own, he couldn’t understand when they say home iswhere the heart is, because, beneath his palm, placed upon a marble-carved chest, there was no beating, instead a steady thrum of energy, and he preferred it that way. He could barely remember what it felt like. He wanted the winter back, the ghostly breaths which would wake him up in a sea of nether and impossible gravity, the fingers and razor teeth which would mark him, and the words which would comfort and unnerve him at the same time, all regardless of the fact it would kill him. He wanted that, then.

 

                All those in autumn died but persevered, waiting for the warmth and the breeze to pick them back up. Maybe he was still stuck in autumn, a rut he couldn’t get out of, and while he could feel the never ending stream run under his fingers which absently traced palpable vertebra now, and while it ran into him in turn, it did little to pick him up.

 

                He wondered why that was. There was a longing, a want, even a need which kept him there as a spirit who shouldn’t exist mouthed over his chest, leaving faint cold burns he didn’t feel. Perhaps that was what stilled him in the in between, between dying and not. He always did love what wasn’t good for him, after all.

 

                “And summer…” The lightest of smiles crossed the Outsider’s bruise-coloured lips, eyes meeting his, “…summer never really happened, did it?”

 

                Daud’s mouth parted, “I don’t think it ever will.”

**Author's Note:**

> it's 5am yo forgive me for any in-contingencies which i'm sure there are many


End file.
